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Washington Post - Speed cameras may be one of the leading sources of driver annoyance in D.C., but they’re doing their job: On streets with cameras installed, speeding has dropped sharply, city data shows.In 2015, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) unveiled a traffic safety initiative called Vision Zero, with the aim of bringing traffic fatalities and injuries to zero. Cameras that automatically detect speeding and stop-sign violations were a central part of the initiative, and hundreds more began to be installed in 2023.

Soon, residents frustrated by reckless driving were demanding more of them; there were nearly 1,200 requests for traffic camera installations last year, according to the District Department of Transportation. To date, the city has installed 477, including 140 since November. And they seem to be working. On two blocks of Wheeler Road SE, for example, citations were down more than 95 percent from February 2022 — the first month cameras were fully activated there — to November 2023, the last month for which figures were available, according to data from the D.C. Office of the Deputy Mayor for Operations and Infrastructure. Drivers amassed 7,556 citations on the 4000 block of Wheeler Road SE in February 2022 and 316 citations in November 2023, the data shows.